http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5212
Quote from: "Warren Ellis"Been meaning to circle back round to this for a while. Every year, Gardner Dozois' YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION anthology runs the circulation figures for the main sf short-fiction magazines. I suspect his figures are a little off, as I'm certain there must be some direct-sales figures that go uncounted in his collation, but the Dozois summation remains the only broad year-on-year record I'm aware of. What follows, then, would be the monthly numbers for end-of-year 2006:
ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION: subscriptions 15117
A drop of 13% from 2005. No numbers given for newsstand sales.
ANALOG: subscriptions 23732 newsstand 4587
Newsstand sales are "soft," returnable — sellthrough is reported at 32%. I'm presuming the above number is the sellthrough number, not the overall circulation before returns. 7.3% loss year-on-year.
FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION: subscriptions 14575 newsstand 3691
According to Dozois, this constitutes a drop of less than 1% — losing some 600 readers overall year-on-year makes them the only magazine thus far mentioned that has made any progress at all in stemming the bleeding.
INTERZONE: "Circulation is in the 2000-to-3000 range." Which I find a bit scary.
Someone recently said to me, "Well, what could you do to save them?" And I said, well, no-one's asking, but there's probably about twelve things that could be done. And they said, "Well, maybe, but what I really meant was — why try? Why not just bury them and start anew?"
And then someone else asked me why there's still an sf magazine called "Analog."
i u odgovor na to,
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/22/sf-magazines-circula.html
Quote from: "Cory Doctorow"Warren Ellis runs the numbers on the dismal state of science fiction magazines -- Asimov's circ is down 13 percent; Interzone is running 2,000-3,000 copies per issue; Analog (which should really change its name back to Astounding) is selling through at 32 percent. This is pretty depressing news.
I think the biggest impediment to the magazines' sales is that there's no easy way for people who love the stories in them to bring them to the attention of other, potential customers. By the time you've read the current issue and found a story you want everyone else to read, the issue isn't on the stands anymore and the best you can do is to try to get your pals to shell out to pay for an ebook edition.
Contrast this with the online mags, whose stories stay online for months -- sometimes forever. If you love a story in Strange Horizons, you can paste a quote from it into your Livejournal, use the first line as your sig, email the URL to your brother, print the first page and tape it up in the toilet at work.
Is it any wonder that the online mags dominate the awards?
If I were running the mags, I'd pick a bunch of sfnal bloggers and offer them advance looks at the mag, get them to vote on a favorite story to blog and put it online the week before the issue hits the stands. I'd podcast a second story, and run excerpts from the remaining stories in podcast. I'd get Evo Terra to interview the author of a third story for The Dragon Page. I'd make every issue of every magazine into an event that thousands of people talked about, sending them to the bookstores to demand copies -- and I'd offer commissions, bonuses, and recognition to bloggers who sold super-cheap-ass subscriptions to the print editions.
Sure it's lot of work, and a huge shift in the way the mags do business. But hell, how many more years' worth of 13 percent declines can the magazines hack?
QuoteSomeone recently said to me, "Well, what could you do to save them?" And I said, well, no-one's asking, but there's probably about twelve things that could be done. And they said, "Well, maybe, but what I really meant was — why try? Why not just bury them and start anew?"
And then someone else asked me why there's still an sf magazine called "Analog."
Kolko god se ja ne razumeo u tiraže, ipak bih rekao da je ovo bedno. Mislim da bi Doktorovljeva fora čak i upalila. Pojma nemam kako bi to išlo u našim uslovima... možda vredi pokušati.
Baen Books je ostvario dosta dobar ucinak sa svojim onlajn magazinom Universe. Stavise, oni imaju jako dobru prodaju svojih elektronskih izdanja, koja cak i pospesuje prodaju papirnih.
Quote from: "warren ellis"I just bought one-year subscriptions to INTERZONE and ASIMOV'S. Which I like to think is fair trade for the shit I've been giving the sf magazines this time around.
A few people have asked me what the twelve things that could be done to "save" the sf magazines are. Maybe I'll get into that next week, if the time becomes available. Half of them start with this: a magazine is a thing that must be designed to be wanted.
But you know what? ASIMOV'S, ANALOG, F&SF — they don't think they need saving. I mean, they haven't changed for years, have they? They're not designed to be wanted because they don't want to be wanted, not really. They want to be left alone to do their thing, and they don't want any loud new people in the room. They serve a dwindling audience, and they have to be aware of that — so they have to be in it to simply serve that audience, to provide that presumably cosy experience to their people until the last light goes out. Otherwise they would have done something different years ago. This is why those three magazines have a web presence that can charitably be described as "vestigial." That's not a dishonourable thing.
I can feel this turning into a longer thought (it's going to lead into what an sf magazine for the web might really look like) that I don't have time to beat into coherency. Another time.
Go and read an issue of Flurb (http://www.flurb.net/)instead.
ili steampunkmagazine (http://steampunkmagazine.com/)